Daylight Saving Time To Steal One of Our Precious Weekend Hours Tomorrow

Daylight Saving Time is upon us everyone- which means that depending on when you go to bed, you’ll either have one less hour of sleep or last call comes one hour earlier in your watering hole of choice tonight!

Unless you have to like, wake up for church or something, chances are you’ll just sleep through it- but then you’ve got to wake up a whole hour earlier on Monday. In fact, we all have to wake up a whole hour earlier on on Monday! But waking up early isn’t the only Daylight Saving Time downside- the observation (which came about thanks to a meddling butterfly collector in the 1800’s who wanted more time after work to look for butterflies, I am totally not making up) is a bit controversial, for a whole multitude of reasonable reasons.

Putting aside reason one- that this means those of us that have to wake up at 7:30 will actually be waking up at 6:30 until we get used to it- there is the slightly more serious alleged Daylight Saving Time side effect of increased risk of death. Yes, recent studies have shown that even an hour’s interruption of sleep as well as screwing with our inner, sun-triggered cavepeople clocks sends us all out of whack and makes us more likely to walk the hell out in front of cars and die.

It happens all the time. So be careful crossing the road, kids. (Also, there is some data that suggests Daylight Saving Time confuses the bejeesus out of your ticker, so heart attacks and other cardiovascular incidents? Also a risk.)

What’s second worse than dying? Losing money, probably, and there is a theory going that Daylight Saving Time is a productivity slayer to boot. The Christian Science Monitor crunched the data and found that come Daylight Saving Time and its subsequent Monday, you’re all going to be hiding a tab with CastleVille in it behind an Excel spreadsheet (yes, YOU):

“…researchers used Google data as well as an experiment that tested how sleep-deprived subjects reacted to having to attend a boring lecture to conclude that the 40 minutes of average sleep lost to daylight saving time causes workers to “self-regulate” less efficiently, and in turn increase their hourly “cyberloafing” by an average of 8.4 minutes. Cyberloafing, of course, is looking at political blogs and surfing Amazon instead of putting the new cover sheets on TPS reports.

The upshot? ‘Global productivity losses from a spike in employee cyberloafing are potentially staggering,’ the researchers conclude.”

Sleeplessness. Death. Loss of productivity. Fiscal losses. More sleeplessness. Isn’t it time we scrapped Daylight Saving Time once and for all, since who the hell collects butterflies anymore?